Why I Don't Vote

 Notes from a reader of pulp prophets

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

I grew up reading the wrong books, depending on whom you ask.

While most of the boys in my neighborhood were preparing for the entrance exams that would determine the rest of their lives, I was somewhere on a folding cot with a paperback whose cover had been creased into submission by countless rereadings. Heinlein. Asimov. Clarke. Bradbury. Le Guin came later, and so did Dick, and so did the Strugatsky brothers when an uncle smuggled in a battered Russian translation. The shelf was mostly western, mostly male, mostly the brand of speculative fiction that pretended to be about spaceships and was actually about civics.

Civics, it turned out, was the entire point.

I did not realize this then. I thought I was reading adventure stories. I thought the long discursive passages where someone gave a lecture in the middle of a battle or a courtroom or a marooned colony were the boring parts you tolerated to get to the next plot beat. That is what a child thinks. The lectures were the plot. The plot was scaffolding for the lectures. Heinlein in particular was so transparent about this that you could practically see the strings, but I was too young and too charmed to mind.

Somewhere around fifteen, I made myself a small private experiment. Not announced to anyone. Not written down. I decided to try to live by the wisest tenets I could extract from the science fiction I loved, the way other boys my age were starting to live by the tenets of religions they had not chosen. I wanted to see what would happen.

What happened was that I stopped voting before I was old enough to vote.

The two sentences that derailed me

There are two sentences that did most of the damage, and they do not agree with each other.

The first is from Robert Heinlein, spoken by Lieutenant Colonel Jean Rasczak in the History and Moral Philosophy classroom of Starship Troopers. The setting is a militarized future where citizenship has to be earned through Federal Service, the implication being that political participation should require something more demanding than turning eighteen and finding the polling station. Rasczak is lecturing on what authority actually is, underneath the polite institutional vocabulary. He says that when you vote, you are exercising political authority, you are using force, and force is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

The second sentence is from Isaac Asimov, in Foundation, voiced by the mayor of Terminus, Salvor Hardin. Hardin is the sort of character Asimov clearly admired, a quiet operator who outmaneuvers militarists and theocrats by refusing to fight them on their preferred terrain. He says, more or less in passing, that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Read those two sentences side by side and notice what happens.

Heinlein says voting is force. Asimov says force is incompetent. Therefore, by the transitive property that no analytic philosopher would actually endorse but every fifteen year old will happily apply, voting is incompetent.

That is bad logic. I am aware. I was aware then, eventually. But the syllogism stayed with me like a song you cannot quite shake, and I started watching the world to see whether the song was wrong or whether it was simply unwelcome.

I was not sure what I was looking at for a long time. I am still not entirely sure.

What I think Heinlein actually meant

People love to argue about whether Heinlein was a fascist, a libertarian, an anarchist with bad habits, or simply a man who enjoyed startling his readers. I think the argument misses the point. The Rasczak speech is not a manifesto. It is a thought experiment. It is the kind of provocation a smart teacher uses to dislodge a comfortable assumption and then asks the class to put it back together more carefully.

The assumption Rasczak is dislodging is the polite fiction that voting is a peaceful, neutral, civic act, like watering a plant or signing a birthday card. It is not. The vote is the front end of a machine whose back end is a man with a gun.

I do not mean that figuratively.

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

Look at what your ballot actually does. You darken an oval. The oval is counted. Counted ovals select people. Those people pass laws. Those laws are interpreted by other people. The interpretations become regulations. The regulations are enforced by armed agents of the state. If you do not comply with the regulations, the agents will, in escalating order, send you a letter, send you a fine, freeze your accounts, take your property, take your liberty, and in some jurisdictions and in some circumstances, take your life.

Every step in that chain is the previous step’s force, multiplied and outsourced. The vote is the consent ceremony at the top of the funnel. It is the moment where you bless the apparatus.

This is true regardless of whom you vote for. It is true if you vote for the kindest, gentlest candidate in the kindest, gentlest party. The kind candidate’s kind law will still be enforced by people with handcuffs. There is no soft version of state authority. There is only the version where the softness is a marketing layer and the version that has stopped pretending.

That is what Rasczak meant. I think he was right about the mechanics, and I think Heinlein knew his readers would flinch, and I think the flinching was the lesson.

What I think Asimov actually meant

Asimov is harder, because Asimov is sneakier.

Hardin’s line about violence being the last refuge of the incompetent gets quoted by people who think it endorses pacifism. It does not. Hardin is not a pacifist. He uses the threat of force constantly. What he refuses to do is resort to it. He treats violence the way a good engineer treats a hard reset, as the option that means every clever solution has failed.

The phrase “last refuge of the incompetent” is doing more work than it gets credit for. It does not say violence is wrong. It says violence is what you reach for when you have run out of better ideas. If you are competent, you have other tools. If you are incompetent, you have only this one, and you mistake the swing of the hammer for the solution to the problem.

Now apply this to voting.

Voting is a tool for selecting agents who will, on your behalf, deploy the largest legal apparatus of force in your geography. The interesting question is not whether the apparatus exists. The interesting question is what kind of person reaches for it first, and how often, and for what.

If you can persuade your neighbor, you do not need a law. If you can build the thing, you do not need a subsidy. If you can compete, you do not need a tariff. If you can teach, you do not need a curriculum mandate.

Most of what people vote for could be accomplished, slower and messier and with more uncertainty, by doing it themselves. Voting is the shortcut that swaps your patience for somebody else’s coercion. Hardin would not have admired the shortcut. Hardin would have asked what you tried first.

The fifteen year old’s experiment, in retrospect

So at fifteen I started keeping a small list of beliefs I held because I had been told to hold them, and I tried to find out which ones survived a question.

Most did not.

The relevant survivor for this essay is the political one. I had absorbed, by osmosis, the ambient conviction that voting was a duty, that not voting was a moral failure, that the franchise was the high water mark of human civilization, and that the people who refused to participate were either lazy or evil or had simply not been educated properly. None of this had ever been argued to me. It had been assumed at me, which is a more powerful thing.

Heinlein and Asimov, between them, gave me permission to argue back.

I am not anti-democratic. I want to be precise about this. I think democracy, as a method for resolving disputes about who gets to wield force, is probably less bad than the alternatives we have actually tried. The historical record is unkind to philosopher kings, hereditary monarchs, vanguard parties, and self-appointed councils of experts. Democracy at least has the decency to make the violence visible and to rotate the people doing it. Churchill’s old line about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others is annoying because it is correct.

But “less bad than the alternatives” is not the same as “good,” and “I will not personally object to the system existing” is not the same as “I will personally participate in it.”

This is the distinction that gets lost in most arguments about voting. People hear “I do not vote” and they reply as though I had said “elections should be abolished.” I have not said that. I have said that I, personally, decline to participate in the consent ceremony at the top of the funnel. The funnel will run without me. It does not need my consent. It will, however, claim it if I give it, and I would rather not.

The map I have been carrying around

It took me years to draw this, and I have redrawn it several times since.

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

The horizontal axis is Heinlein’s, in a sense. On the left is force, on the right is consent. The vertical axis is Asimov’s. On the top is competence, on the bottom is incompetence.

Most of human cooperation, the parts I actually admire, lives in the upper right. Two engineers reviewing each other’s pull request. A surgeon explaining a procedure to a patient who can refuse. A farmer selling produce to a buyer who can walk away. Open source. Mutual aid. The boring beautiful machinery of voluntary association between competent people.

The upper left is conscription, expert bureaucracy, the rare case where coercion is exercised with skill. It is dangerous because it works. Heinlein had complicated feelings about this quadrant. He gave it the most flattering portrait it has ever received in fiction and then trusted us to notice the cost.

The lower right is harmless. Astrology columns. Online polls about which celebrity is best. Things people do voluntarily and that achieve nothing measurable. I have no quarrel with this quadrant. I sometimes live in it.

The lower left is where Asimov was looking. Coercion exercised badly. Force as a substitute for thought. The cop who escalates because he never learned to deescalate. The legislator who bans because he cannot persuade. The voter who votes harder, with more passion and more turnout, because the previous vote did not produce the result he wanted.

I look at where ordinary mass-participation electoral politics actually sits on this map and I am sorry to report that it is closer to the lower left than to the upper right. Not because the people in it are stupid. The people in it are often very smart. It is because the act itself is a request for somebody else, somewhere down the chain, to apply force to your neighbor. And whether that force is competent depends on factors you do not control and cannot meaningfully audit.

I do not want to make that request.

Religion as the language of imagined beings

There is a related thread I have been pulling at for a long time, and I want to put it next to the political one because I think they are the same shape.

I have come to suspect, somewhere between strongly and very strongly, that religion is the language of how people choose to lead their lives based on imagining mythical beings. Notice the construction. I am not saying religion is false. That is a different and much smaller claim. I am saying religion is a language. It is a vocabulary and a grammar that humans evolved for the purpose of organizing their behavior around shared invisible referents.

This is a tremendously useful technology. It allows large groups of unrelated people to act as though they share goals and constraints. It compresses moral reasoning into stories you can tell a child. It produces solidarity at a scale that biology does not provide on its own. The historian Yuval Harari makes an adjacent argument and so do many others before him, but the formulation I find most useful is older and quieter. Humans live, in significant part, by treating fictions as if they were facts, because the fiction-treating is what makes coordination possible above the size of a hunting band.

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

Now. Here is where the political thread and the religious thread braid together.

Look at what voting actually requires you to believe.

You have to believe that there exists a thing called The State, or The Nation, or The People, that is larger and more authoritative than any individual human inside it. You have to believe that this thing has a will, that the will can be measured by aggregating ovals on paper, and that the measurement legitimately authorizes force against members of the same population that produced the ovals. You have to believe that a piece of paper from 1787, or 1949, or 1950, written by people long dead, binds people not yet born. You have to believe that there is a continuity between the founders and the current occupants of the seats they once occupied that is morally relevant and not merely architectural.

None of these are crazy beliefs. I want to be clear about that. I hold versions of several of them on my better days. They are, however, beliefs in invisible collective entities. The State is no more directly perceptible than Vishnu or Yahweh. You can point to a building, the way a believer can point to a temple, but the building is not the thing. The thing is the agreement that the building stands for something. The thing is the shared imagination.

Religion at least has the dignity to admit that it is asking you to believe in something invisible. Politics often pretends that it is not asking the same favor. That pretense is, to me, a small cousin of dishonesty. Not a big one. Not the kind that should send anyone to hell, if hell were a thing, which on the evidence available it is not. Just a small daily dishonesty about what kind of belief is actually being requested.

I was raised in a culture that gave me, free of charge, some of the most elaborate mythological architecture humanity has ever produced. The Mahabharata alone is roughly ten Iliads stacked on top of each other and shaken vigorously. I was also raised in a family with a connection, distant and not easily summarized in a paragraph, to Jagadish Chandra Bose, who spent his career trying to dissolve the line between the living and the not-living using actual instruments and actual measurements. Both of these inheritances pull against the project of treating any one mythology as final. The first because it gave me too many to choose from. The second because it gave me a habit of asking what could be measured.

When I apply that habit to voting, the measurement comes back as a request to participate in a ritual whose function is to consecrate force. I am free to participate. I am free not to. I have, so far, chosen not.

What this is not

I am not telling you not to vote. I have made a private decision and I am explaining it. The explanation is not a campaign.

I am not claiming moral superiority. The non-voter who sits out an election is not somehow purer than the voter who shows up at six in the morning to stand in a queue. We are both inside the same machine. I have simply declined to push the button labeled “consent.”

I am not advocating for any specific alternative system. The honest answer is that I do not know what should replace mass-participation electoral democracy at scale, and the people who are very confident that they do know make me nervous. The graveyard of twentieth-century political experiments is large and the headstones are not subtle.

I am not anti-civic. I pay my taxes, on the theory that the state has the guns and I do not, and that calibrating my objections to the level where I lose the rest of my life is poor allocation. I follow the laws I find tolerable. I quietly ignore the ones I find absurd, the way most adults do, and I accept the risk that comes with that. I serve my community in the ways my hands and my work allow. I just decline to bless the funnel.

The science fiction children grow up

Heinlein died in 1988. Asimov in 1992. Both of them lived long enough to see their own predictions about politics curdle in interesting ways. Heinlein’s vision of earned citizenship became a recruitment poster the United States never quite hung up. Asimov’s vision of a benevolent technocracy became a Silicon Valley fundraising deck.

The boys who grew up reading them, and the smaller number of girls who were allowed to, are now adults in middle age. Some became engineers. Some became lawyers. A few became writers. A handful became philosophers. Almost none of us became politicians, which I suspect was the actual long-game these authors were running. They were not training the next generation of voters. They were training the next generation of skeptics about voting.

I am, on most days, grateful for that training.

I do not know if I am right about any of this. The honest position is that I am applying tenets borrowed from fiction to a question that fiction is not actually qualified to answer, and I am aware that this is, at minimum, a charming kind of intellectual mischief. I have made my peace with the mischief. I think most political theory is a slightly more ornate version of the same trick.

The next election is coming. It is always coming. People I love and respect will go and vote and feel that they have done something meaningful. Some of them will feel betrayed afterward. Some will feel vindicated. Most will feel a low background hum of dissatisfaction that they will mistake for civic conscience.

I will be at home, probably reading.

Probably something with a spaceship on the cover.

The lectures are the plot.